I’m currently reading a book about bass behavior and physiology and in the chapter regarding skin senses they talk about the preferred pH levels of water inhabited by bass as well as bass’ reaction to changes in acidity. There’s a table in the book that shows common substances pH levels, starting with stomach acid at 1.5pH and ending with ammonia at 11.7pH. One down on the list from ammonia is milk of magnesia at 9.9pH. Just a few down from there is urine at 7.4pH.
Based off of reading this chart, would drinking urine help with heartburn, if that’s all that one had available?
Note- this is for informational purposes only. I’d rather have heartburn than have to drink pee.
Normal urinary pH can range from 5 to 8, depending on how the body is metabolizing that day. So you could end up diluting a (relatively) strong, concentrated acid with a weak, dilute acid or a weak, dilute base. It’ll make the stomach a bit less acid, but at the cost of drinking your own wee.
Calcium tabs are much more effective, and cheaper.
Just going off the contents of urine listed in wikipedia, it doesn’t seem that urine is a well buffered solution. I’m not even sure that HCl would protonate urea very effectively though I would have to actually look at the pka’s to know for sure. Amides are not very basic though. My guess is that it wouldn’t be much better than plain old water. Incidently, wikipedia gives a slightly lower pH fo urine, but it won’t make much difference.
Old urine would have produced some ammonia, and that might help some. Of course old urine has that issue of bacteria. It’s probably not too healthy to drink.
From the Henderson-Hasselbach equation it seems the vitamin C (which has a pKa of 4.17 for the first proton) should be somewhat deprotonated at standard urine pH’s. As I understand it (and not being an MD I don’t), ascorbic acid is excreted pretty much as is. This should serve as a buffer to absorb excess protons. Of course alternatively, it may just lower the pH of your urine.
Understand, I think we would be talking about near lethal doses of vitamine C in order to have an observable effect.
